ORN#9 Hydropower at Hoover Dam

Hi friends,

Our latest video, ORN#9 Hydropower at Hoover Dam, is now online and ready for your viewing pleasure. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NvyAlSeZFc



We visited Hoover Dam in Boulder City, Nevada (pronounced Nev-aaaa-da) to get an up-close example of big hydroelectric power. Hoover Dam is one of the largest hydropower dams in the U.S. and a national landmark…plus it was on the way.

I didn’t want to just show up with a video camera and try to interview someone there, so I called ahead to set up something official. The contact I spoke with told me about the filming fee for Hoover Dam, which was…significant to say the least. That wasn’t going to work. Fortunately, I contacted several different people and got a reply from someone else there who gave us the in, and we interviewed one of the tour guides for Hoover Dam which worked out great! We got to tag along on the tour and film inside the dam, which is a rare treat.

Hydroelectric dams produce most of the renewable electricity in the U.S., and Energy Secretary Steven Chu said that we could easily double the hydropower in this country by replacing older inefficient turbines and adding new capacity to existing dams. In fact, only 3% of the country’s 80,000 dams produce electricity – most are used for irrigation, flood control, and water treatment.

Hoover Dam produces 2,080 megawatts of electricity every year – that’s an incredible amount of power. That’s three times more power than the world’s largest wind farm we visited in Roscoe, Texas, and it’s a constant base-load source of electricity. It’s enough to supply 1.3 million homes with power!

There are very real environmental impacts for hydroelectric dams. Dams can greatly affect the ecology of a river system. Some dams build up lakes as storage behind the dams and others are run-of-river dams that let the water flow through. While flooding areas to become lakes behind the dams dramatically changes the ecosystem, some people argue that harnessing and controlling the river flow offsets the damage that comes from seasonal flooding. Of course, that’s a natural cycle too. There are lively debates on the environmental impacts of hydroelectric dams.

I included an internet-only video extra that is just for a bit of fun, ORN Extra: Bodies in Hoover Dam. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4teeOCLqxs)



While on the tour, the guide addressed the old rumor that there are bodies buried in Hoover Dam. There were, in fact, 96 men who died on-site during the construction of the dam between 1931 and 1936, but beyond that I’ll let the video give you the answer. This video extra is not going to be included in the DVD to distribute to schools – it’s a bit dark and off-topic for that. I included it online because it’s an interesting snippet about the dam, and it may be the kind of short video that gets passed around and generates a lot of hits - we’ll see.

Be well,
Colin